Your Blogging Staff

Contributing to this blog:
- "Dave" is Dave Barry, who is a humor columnist and presidential contender.
- "judi" is Judi Smith, who is Dave's Research Department, as well as being interested in men.
- "Walter" is Walter, a bone from the penis of a walrus.

Y'all are on your own - seems I am the only one that the Aspen Times wants to require to register for the article. Fat Boy is one thing - Big Brother is another.
(I am not paranoid - but that doesnt mean that I am not being watched)

*snork* @ this description: "...small, rather rotund, inanimate figurine that resembles a diminutive French chef"

The SRRIFTRAD French Chef was later discovered not to have been stolen. He had temporarily vacated his position in front of the Cooking School of Aspen, and was moonlighting as a midget Sonny Bono at K-Fed's birthday party.

OK, scratch that. Decided to open it in Firefox instead of my RSS feed reader. And lo and behold, success.

And to those similarly stuck:
Wanted at cooking school: One 'Fat Boy'

By John Colson

Aspen Times Staff Writer

Calling all cars, calling all cars: Be on the lookout for a small, rather rotund, inanimate figurine that resembles a diminutive French chef.

If apprehended, treat with caution; its safe return might be worth a free and very tasty meal.

In yet another of the area's occasional cases of mascot mischief, one of the "Fat Boys" has gone missing from the front of the Cooking School of Aspen and Fine Food Market on the Hyman Avenue mall.

The Fat Boys, school Director John Klonowski said, came to the school nine years ago from "some exclusive French chef shop" in Paris. The owners planted the small figurines, which resemble a pair of chefs in full kitchen regalia, in front of the school, and they have graced that spot ever since.

Until Friday, when someone nabbed one a day after a school staffer took one of them down from its perch on a wall-mounted planter, where it was temporarily set for the winter, and placed it on the ground. The case of the runaway Fat Boy was not discovered until Saturday morning, when the shop opened for business.

"I can't believe it," Klonowski said in tone of mild outrage. "Somebody stole one of the Fat Boys."

He said he would be contacting the Aspen Police Department on Monday, but "we haven't put out an all-points bulletin ... we just wanted to get the word out."

There is a reward for the Fat Boy's return - one free "entertainment dining experience" at the cooking school, estimated to be worth between $130 and $170. The school can be reached at 920-1879.

This is not the first time a local business has lost its mascot to a bit of chicanery.

Back in the last century someone pilfered the pig that stands guard over the door to the Woody Creek Tavern, prompting a "rescue mission" by Gaylord Guenin, who at the time was the "mayor of Woody Creek," and a band of local mercenaries.

Guenin, whose best guess was that the incident happened "some time in the 1980s," recalled this week that he called the culprits at the Hickory House restaurant, where the pig had been posted over the front door, to warn them of the impending rescue. He said the Hick House staff put a ladder up to the roof to facilitate the rescue.

It wasn't too many years later that the snarling grizzly bear above the same door at the Hickory House, which someone donated to the restaurant in response to the pig incident, was itself stolen.

The bear was held for weeks before being returned by its abductorTim Dudley 3/27/06 , believed at the time to have been longtime resident character Shady Lane.

Because the statute of limitations is now well past, I can tell of the time my fellow sorority pledges kidnapped a Frisch's Big Boy statue. The restaurant had it up on a trailer that was not secured on the edge of a college campus. We moved it various places around campus, including the President's front lawn, using the trailer hitch on one of my sisters' olive green AMC Matador (a noble vehicle and a reliable getaway car.)

The third atomic bomb, "Big Boy," was never used because of Japan's surrender. To commemorate the end of World War II, nuclear physicist Richard "Little Dicky" Feynman started a chain of restaurants, with the grand opening on June 28, 1947. In the original restraunts, cooking was done by exposing the food high levels of radiation from a uranium fuel rod. Most "Big Boy" restraunts have now switched over to natural gas, with the exception of "Feynman's Big Boy," in New Mexico, "Teller's Big Boy" in Nevada, and "Frisch's Big Boy" in Ohio, Kentucky and Indiana. The original Big Boy bomb is on display at "Feynman's Big Boy #1" in Albuquerque.

I too can now confess to being in on the theft of a large steer that sat outside a local steak house. We put it on the roof of the gym at our high school two days before graduation. We got napped & didn't get to officially graduate until the steer was taken home. No bull. I was in my ford pinto for that exploit. Another noble steed.

D. Esker...you bring back such wonderful memories of my girlhood, when Edward Teller regularly appeared on B & W TV, to announce the he had once again decided that the permissable level of 'background radiation' could be raised. It was very reassuring that he managed to keep slightly ahead of the level we were living with on a daily basis througout the above-ground nuclear testing.

Ah, those were the days. These fads go in cycles, you know. I feel that it is time we brought back full-scale testing of atomic weapons. The explosions are WAY prettier than the biological weapons we are developing now. I think that as long as the public has to pay for doomsday weapons, we should at least be getting our money's worth, entertainment-wise. Remember, that increase in background radiation was a sign of 'your tax dollars at work.' Nowdays we have no way of knowing if the money is really being spent on ways to kill everybody, or if we are being ripped off.

D...You're right -- them mushroom clouds SHOWED where our money went. Remember the figures on how "many times over" the US and Russia could kill everyone on earth? "Them Rooshians have enough nuckewlar bombs to kill everyone on earth ten times over." "Well, WE can kill everyone TWENTY times over. So there!"

Wonder if the pig-napping was ever solved. The Woody Creek Tavern was, as I hope you all know, the home away from home of the late great Hunter Thompson, who could well have been involved, but who I actually would have pictured as being one of the mercernaries.

>>Back in the last century someone pilfered the pig that stands guard over the door to the Woody Creek Tavern, prompting a "rescue mission" by Gaylord Guenin, who at the time was the "mayor of Woody Creek," and a band of local mercenaries.

KOW, thanks for printing the article. I'm a entusiastic supporter of registering for the Miami Herald because that's Dave's paper, but I h ave too much repressed hostility toward Claire "always gets posted" Martin to register for her paper.